Reynir Harðarson, (pronounced “Hardarson” or “Hartharson”? the jury is out) who was one of the key imaginations behind Eve Online and the original art director, is now working on the World Of Darkness MMO in Atlanta. He talks quietly and rapidly, making transcribing and interview like this one (conducted in a noisy conference hall) incredible painful. Nevertheless it’s worth doing because he is articulate and incredibly astute, and I think this brief conversation captures a fragment of that. It staggers me each day that his work, and the work of CCP as a whole, gets ignored and over-looked by the industry.

Frankly I don’t give a crap whether you liked Eve, or found it boring, or unplayable or anything else: what you need to understand are the principles that are at its foundations, because they’re principles that can be applied to stop MMOs becoming stale and inflexible in the future. The number of people I’ve encountered working on MMOs who don’t really know anything about Eve Online is shocking, and I regard that lack of knowledge of the work of people like Harðarson as one of the key reasons why MMOs are progressing so slowly, and regurgitating the same tired, tiresome ideas over and over again.

Anyway, let’s get down to the interview.

RPS: So you’re moving from Iceland to Atlanta?

Yes, I’m helping with the design of the World Of Darkness game, which is now in production. I’ve moved my family out there, bought a house, and so on.

RPS: A pretty big move. And you’re setting up your second studio – what’s that like?

Well it’s actually our third studio, we have one in Shanghai as well. Well none of them are quite complete, but we’re building that studio in Shanghai and also one in Atlanta. [Where White Wolf are based] We’re now in the process of locating the right people, and we’re going to have about seventy people in Atlanta. What’s nice about that is that we already have quite a strong foundation already having merged with White Wolf, so it is about turning White Wolf into a game development company which has many challenges. But it’s different this time around, of course. When we started Eve we were virtually green, complete beginners, and now it’s… very different. We already have the technology, we already have a rolling start. There’s so much we’ve already achieved.

RPS: You and I have discussed, on many occasions, the difference between Eve and more, shall we say “classical” MMOs… Are you going to apply the principles of Eve in your new game design?

Yes, the key, we still believe, is human interaction. The World of Darkness game shares that vision. We wouldn’t really be in this business if it wasn’t for those principles…. I want to say so much, but I really can’t at this stage. But it’s about being real in the way that Eve feels real. People should really feel it: they’re not just playing a game… you know what I mean by that.

RPS: I do. Eve is real because it’s processes might be abstract but they’re still analogous to the gains and losses of real life. It’s a far more natural system than most games, which you see in the economy and the combat. And it makes me wonder why people haven’t copied Eve’s model. Why haven’t people tried to steal your ideas?

Well you say that but I think the zeitgeist is moving this way… human interaction. If you think about the websites like Facebook, YouTube, they have similar human input, and they’re much bigger than the MMOs. People are paying more attention now and realising that the point about MMOs is that they are about human interaction. The first couple of generations of MMOs have been single player games with lots of people in them, and there’s not much of a fundamental difference in the game design philosophy. There needs to be, and we can learn to do that.